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He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes? Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for se

• sumnole 5y ago
  Devil's advocate here. Failing sufficient encouragement to do tasks (psychological/sociological rewards as got through volunteering), most of those tasks can be automated or replaced by an alternative.
  • lotu 5y ago
    Not in a reasonable time frame. Do you really believe we could fully automate all dishwashing over the next decade?
    • ben_w 5y ago
      Plausible it could be automated. No idea how much it would cost, and while electric dishwashers have been a thing for longer than I’ve been alive, there’s not enough room in my current place to install one, and a humanoid cleaning robot would also have nowhere to stow itself.
  • cameronh90 5y ago
    Who's going to do it until it's automated? Who's going to pay to automate it?
• pmichaud 5y ago
  Is it "usually women" who do the unglamorous jobs that no one else wants to do? This doesn't really seem true, but maybe you have a source that shows it?
  • iamacyborg 5y ago
    > From cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-...
    • bbarnett 5y ago
      If one is in a commune, all work is unpaid, so how is this relatable? If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?! Is this stat from 1870?
      • iamacyborg 5y ago
        > If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?! There's more to unpaid labour than fetching wood and water. Women still do significantly more housework than men, even if both hold full time employment.
        • bbarnett 5y ago
          That may be true, or untrue. However, citing a stat from before anyone was born, isn't helpful in a modern context. Replying to this with "it is still true, because", now that your citation fell flat on its face, may not be the best strategy.
    • unpolloloco 5y ago
      Unpaid doesn't always mean that it's the least glamorous (in the absence of compensation for anyone). Take anything on Dirty Jobs, for example. If you're talking the difference between washing laundry and cleaning out septic tanks most people would prefer one over the other in the absence of other pay.
• suifbwish 5y ago
  Maybe if it was only the people who did the jobs that no one wants to do who get paid then people wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the money system. How many thousands of years would a dishwasher need to work in order to earn what someone does in one year from making 100 million in a year as a corporate fat cat, a sports player, movie star or a business owner
  • okr 5y ago
    If you can wash dishes for a billion people in the world, freeing everyone from the burden of taking, sorting, drying, washing dishes, putting all dish washers out of work, i guess, you can become pretty rich too. People will have time to do something else.
  • ben_w 5y ago
    How much money should the modern inventor of the electric dishwasher receive, given the labour saved by the invention? And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best. The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them. And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?
    • suifbwish 5y ago
      You seem to think I don’t understand why these people get paid large sums. That is not so. I merely said these people/“jobs” are the reason many are for doing away with the current money system as a means for ensuring essential work that no one wants to do is done. Personally I am for federal laws that impose a logarithmic tax scaling system where anything over $2 million personal income in owned assets is taxed at an 75% rate and an emigration tax of 95%. The only rights are what the people decide is right. I’m so tired of hearing about how people are entitled to this and that unquestionably. No one is entitled to anything but what everyone else is willing to let them have and what they are able to keep everyone else from taking. Right and wrong are about as real as the shapes and animals we are in clouds and smoke.
• tunap 5y ago
  >They go on for several years with several people... making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. That sounds like modern retail workers who have spouses to supplement earnings to house & feed themselves.
  • kangnkodos 5y ago
    Yeah. With money, there are lots of problems such as this too. I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money.
    • balfirevic 5y ago
      > I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money. Sounds quite not-evil to me.
• igorkraw 5y ago
  I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer based. And in most associations, people are if not happy then perfectly willing to do the boring job if that's the way they become a part of the association. Social norms and customs and their establishment are a whole lot more complicated than "punishment from leaders"
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  • sokoloff 5y ago
    > If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.
    • igorkraw 5y ago
      So what's motivating them? The post is responded to implied it's something else than punishment.
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        Maybe a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that they've done something with their day, some structure, a place to be that isn't their house, something to do besides watch TV all day, some interaction with their co-workers, a bit of exercise? Do you not feel any sense of accomplishment from mundane things that you do well once they're done? It doesn't have to solely be that they prefer food with their meals.
• mikem170 5y ago
  Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing evermore!" Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies. Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides. Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff. [0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt
  • sjg007 5y ago
    It’s amazing how money actually came to be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Before money, people traded services and power. In this sense, money is just an accounting tool to track the same
    • mikem170 5y ago
      Not exactly the same. Money changed a lot of things, much more than just an accounting tool. The use of money drastically changed the scale in which goods and services could be traded. Before money people kept track of who owed who a favor amongst the people they dealt with. Family, friends, and others learned who they could trust not to be a mooch. Money made possible much larger scale projects, enabling the industrial revolution to proceed at breakneck speed, the ability to wage world wars, and a modern global finance system treating everyone and everything as fungible, with credit scores replacing personal bonds of trust, billionaire leveraged buyouts and market manipulations, consumer/debt culture, sanctions, etc.
• deleted 5y ago
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• boomlinde 5y ago
  Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off. The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off. Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job? Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone? The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries. And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
    • bserge 5y ago
      In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.
      • vorpalhex 5y ago
        Every office, multi-tenant household and often times families themselves fight over this. People will not do tasks merely because it's "fair". Otherwise crime would have evaporated, life would be harmonious, and judges would be bored.
        • bserge 5y ago
          Well, then it's back to violence. Truly the ultimate force.
• guerrilla 5y ago
  I hate arguments like this. People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And no there's no free-rider problem because they don't have to do dishes for anyone else.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications? Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading. It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.
    • LinuxBender 5y ago
      To add to that it isn't even legal to be self sufficient. I know how to make several prescription drugs but the moment I provide them to anyone else or anyone finds out I make them I will be put in a cage.
      • deleted 5y ago
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    • jamincan 5y ago
      It also almost always requires a lot of land. You could not feed the globe if everyone was self-sufficient.
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      You're moving the goalpost while also adding the artificial restriction that people can't cooperate.
    • mikem170 5y ago
      > I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading. Some people do, but we pretty much made it illegal.
• redsummer 5y ago
  Hundreds of communes have been started in the US, and the only ones that survive are the religious ones. The people who join political ones often just want to pontificate on the sofa while someone else does the dishes. That’s not sustainable. What makes the religious ones survive? Perhaps they have in their mind a higher being, which gives them the strength to continue.
• knighthack 5y ago
  > They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue. In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
  • birdyrooster 5y ago
    Especially given that men have taken on tasks far more dangerous and difficult than doing the dishes and have always died sooner. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlier-than-women-201602199137 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      And the same is still true. Something that I hear no feminist talking about is the gap in occupational injury deaths, which is massive. We should really start working on it for more equal society.
      • watwut 5y ago
        I have seen feminists to push for women to be allowed in combat roles. I have seen them also promoting less gendered toys and occupations in child stories. Meaning also more cars for girls. Meaning driving, being cop as occupation for women too. More equality here would mean exactly that - women driving and being on the streets more, women working in late money handling shifts, women in combat positions. Then there are hazards in occupations where physical force is an actual factor - construction and some farming jobs. Hazard here is mostly from overextending people. There, I dont see employers running for someone physically weaker. But then again, there is feminist push to promote technological/construction interests to girls. Tho in the latter category of jobs, unionization and regulation would do a lot for safety on itself. Then again, same can be said about driving. Driving jobs often push people toward a lot of hours and risk, whether you are tired or not. More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.
• lrdswrk00 5y ago
  > Who would wash the dishes? Presumably the person who dirtied them. So they can use clean dishes and not get sick from mold growing from the old food? Science has given us plenty of evidence to do as we do in a number of contexts. Deferring to the politically empowered is an unscientific basis for economic activity. We need not rely on the superstitions of dead men who were less educated than us.
• elliekelly 5y ago
  Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.
    • elliekelly 5y ago
      Does human generosity scale though? I’m not so sure. Because we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable. The generosity doesn’t seem able to keep pace.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        >we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable. I fundamentally disagree. I think the percent of humans suffering from hunger, thirst, sickness, and displacement is also at an all time low.
      • stevejb 5y ago
        Uh yeah this is totally wrong. Life has never been better for the vast majority of the world's population.
• paganel 5y ago
  Societies can work without money, or without using them that often, there used to be many self-sufficient peasant communities (villages and even entire mountain valleys) that used to manage just fine without actually using (much) money. Of course that modernity and the industrial revolution put a stop to that but it can be done.
• VictorPath 5y ago
  > If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat. There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach. Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
  • seriousquestion 5y ago
    Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?
    • wizzwizz4 5y ago
      I don't know of any, but does it need to?
      • ativzzz 5y ago
        Yes, unless you'd like our current society, which is astronomically larger than dunbar's number, to collapse, in a most likely very violent manner.
    • erikerikson 5y ago
      This is an excellent point. The scaling of social accountability is a difficult problem. In my opinion it is a root problem of humanity and our current solutions are due for disruption.
    • VictorPath 5y ago
      It depends how groups are defined. Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons). Groups from the beginning of human behavioral modernity to the rise of agricultural slave empires in Sumeria etc. 10,000 years back worked this way. So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas. The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands. (To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)
• indigochill 5y ago
  I don't understand why the dishwashers leaving needs to cause societal breakdown, though. After they leave, surely someone thinks "Hm, we have no clean dishes any more and nobody's volunteering, so I guess I'll need to clean some dishes, if only for myself, but then once I'm in dishwashing mode it's efficient to clean more dishes than I personally need, and even better if someone decides to reward me for cleaning their dishes by doing my laundry since they realized someone needs to do that". I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange? It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
  • jimbob21 5y ago
    You'd be fine with doing a number of people's dishes every single day, dishes that are never cleaned by their user, for multiple hours with no pay because you're in dishwashing mode?
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >If that happened, who would wash the dishes? I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke. It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects. Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
  • scarmig 5y ago
    But we are special, so naturally it'd be we who get the interesting exciting jobs in the post-money society. It'd be all the non-special people who'd be cleaning shit off the sidewalk, though of course they'd enjoy it since they would no longer be burdened by money.
  • lazide 5y ago
    A great many people here have not.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    The really crappy jobs are invisible. I don’t really know anyone who hates their line of work or lacks interest in their field (plenty in their job, but not their field). That’s probably because I only know salaried professionals/soon to be professionals (interns).I suspect many others are in the same boat.
    • burntoutfire 5y ago
      Not really invisible, they're just not in your social circle. In other social circles, people (I've spoken to such people, it's not a made up example), claim that well-paying or non-horrible jobs don't exist, as they've never met anyone who has such job.
  • vxNsr 5y ago
    > Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this? You’ve hit the crux of the issue. Most people who push for these types of social changes have rarely been involved in the hard work. They’re the “ideas” person. Same people who wanna give you 5% of their amazing idea so you can implement it.
• an_opabinia 5y ago
  The Victoria man is a radical, he's there to start an interesting conversation, he's succeeding. > power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out. Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder. It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
• iamadog1029 5y ago
  I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then. Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore. Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example. [1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.